marathoner452

Life is good.  Tuesday night I got sick and tired of sitting around my hotel room so I wandered on down to The Mall and checked out the WWII Memorial, saw the Washington Monument in the Reflecting Pool at night, and walked up the Lincoln Memorial.  Last night, I had dinner up in Georgetown at Thaiphoon and lunch on 19th Street at Corner Bakery Cafe.  Green Papaya salad with spicy lime dressing and coconut curry chicken and a chicken pesto sandwich.  All I gotta say is that I could get used to living like this and good thing I'm running so much beacuse there's all kinds of good food to eat.  That, and it's probably quicker to walk anyplace around here because traffic in DC is always horrendous and I stink at parallel parking.  6 miles Wednesday night, 5 miles last night, and 15 miles tomorrow morning.  Then Sunday morning at 8:46 is the Run to Remember 5k, and Monday I get back to work in the Deployment Center, though fortunately there's not much going on around here.  I'm hoping Friday I'll get to come home for good, because I have sub. training a week from Monday.

I don't know how I pull this off.  My first disaster assignment was in New Orleans and this one is in DC.  You're not getting any complaints from me.

~Bethany

I'll be working at the Staff Deployment center in downtown DC starting tomorrow at noon.  I'll be there for at least a few days, maybe longer depending on what Ernesto does before it makes landfall.  Right now it's breaking up over eastern Cuba, it's barely a tropical storm, and the prediction cone keeps drifting farther east.  So if it brushes Florida with a few inches of rain and 40 mph winds, then I'll be home by Friday.  If it's much worse than that, I might not be home for awhile but it won't be any more than 3 weeks.

I'll get to stay in a motel in downtown DC and work with a bunch of cool Red Cross people for a few days, if nothing else.  Given that otherwise I'd just be sitting around the house catching up on my reading and staring at the wall, it works for me.  Life is good.

In other news, I had more fun running the Annpolis 10-Miler (I'm finisher #2571) yesterday than I've had with any race in a long time.  I'd forgotten how much fun big races (this one had 5,000 runners) are.  Lots of music, lots of excitement, always lots of people around, and dozens of residents out there with sprinklers and hoses to keep us cool.  Yeah it was hot and humid and rather hilly, just like Maryland distance runners always say, but I'll definitely do it again.  We got nice fleece pullovers and icy cold towels at the finish and we got to run over the Severn River.  The hills aren't THAT bad either, no worse than Bachman Valley (though that's not saying much).  I'm kinda sore today, but not too sore.  Marathon training continues on.

~Bethany